How did you learn, and on what?

16 Replies - 1082 Views - Last Post: 10 March 2008 - 05:55 PM

First machine and first language?

Posted 10 March 2008 - 01:14 AM

Hey- just been going through the memory banks here and found my first computer- atari 800 xl. I learned a bit of Atari Basic to code on it, but a lack of memory (64 Kb RAM, 24 Kb ROM kind of got in the way.

The machine did have a plug in tape recorder drive that wrote to standard audio tapes, but it was all dodgy at best- you had a very dicey chance of anything being useful again later. And the bonus with using audio tapes was that anyone could come and use you program files to record music over!

Replies To: First machine and first language?

Re: First machine and first language?

Posted 10 March 2008 - 01:28 AM

My 1st machine was an Acer Aspire, it was an 8088 with 2 five & quarter floppy drives, no hard drive & no modem. I learned DOS 3.3 on it, which I am great-full for, because being used to the command line interface it was an easy move to Linux/Unix.

Re: First machine and first language?

Posted 10 March 2008 - 09:49 AM

Hehe, I remember reading up on how to pet your Commodore a long time ago. It was changing where the graphics and memory were stored, which allowed me more room for something... I forgot but it made more sense than the default configuration.

Re: First machine and first language?

Posted 10 March 2008 - 10:35 AM

The first computer that I worked on was an Apple IIe. Of course I mainly played games on it as well. My first computers, yes plural, were the old 286, 386, and 486 machines, and I started programming with QBasic. I had also created a network so to speak before networking became popular. All this was for school between the ages of 14 and 16.

Re: First machine and first language?

Posted 10 March 2008 - 11:18 AM

thehat, on 10 Mar, 2008 - 02:41 AM, said:

Is the Spectrum 48 allowed?

My first was ZX 81, we eventually upgraded to a 48k. The monitor was greenscale. We still had teh nets back then though. Underneath the desk was a modem with an acoustic coupler attached and we had an account with Prestel. BBS were teh bomb.
We also had an early 3.5" floppy drive, the case of which was literally 3-4 times the size of the computer itself.

My first PC was a 286 8mhz 512k ram, 20mb hdd and with a colour EGA screen ('Catacombs abyss' rocked on this setup). I owned a couple of Wang XTs but I actually got them after the 286.

Re: First machine and first language?

Posted 10 March 2008 - 12:35 PM

Man, that's cool. Back then I could just about make mine play a tune, I really only played games on it. Then I bought an adapter for a joystick that caught fire and melted my poor speccy beyond repair.